Patterns of Writing

Because good writers tend to be good readers (and vice versa), one effective way to teach grammar and writing is to build upon students' intrinsic understanding of language and to teach them how to identify and mimic patterns in language. This textbook improves that intrinsic sense of grammar by teaching students to identify and imitate sentence patterns, by providing a variety of texts that model good sentence patterns, and by teaching students how to identify patterns in larger texts (such as brochures, creative stories, interviews, and essays). 

This textbook provides sample readings from a variety of texts: brochures, letters of advice or compliant, interviews, descriptive stories, narrative stories, different types of creative stories, compare/contrast essays, classification essays, and argumentative essays. The last two sections in this book contain many exercises for learning how to identify and imitate good sentence patterns and tips for how to identify and correct patterns of error.